


Tomb

by the_original_starfruit



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Oneshot, Physical Abuse, References to Depression, Toxic Relationship, freewrite - Freeform, implied lapidot, oh look it's not human au for once
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 14:10:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11083221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_original_starfruit/pseuds/the_original_starfruit
Summary: After Jasper, Lapis struggles to remember how to breathe. Luckily, someone is there to keep her from ducking under.





	Tomb

**Author's Note:**

> hi guys ! 
> 
> this is a 30 minute freewrite that i did awhile back, and resisted the impulse to clean up and just left as is. apologies if the flow is weird because of that
> 
> please drop a comment with any constructive criticism or opinions <3

Lapis preferred not to dwell on those months spent as Malachite.

     From her perch on the top of the silo, it was comforting to look out into the sunset and just let herself be; not thinking, not breathing, not even acknowledging herself. Especially not acknowledging herself. These were the things Jasper had made painful.

     The darkness – crushing, all-encompassing, the end of every scrap of brightness or joy, water crushing, pressing, squeezing, drowning, a thousand million pounds of it all around and under and above her – them - the first time Lapis had never felt joy in water. It was the equivalent to the mirror, just another prison, but worse this time – she had someone else in there, someone who she could force to share her pain. Lapis lied. There had been some small amount of happiness in the tomb of Malachite’s existence, that was the worst part – the sick pleasure she had gained from holding Jasper down, like the kind of twisted fulfillment an abusive master would get from chaining and beating a mad dog. Slavering, roaring, screams of hatred and pain, terror and suffering for both of them. It had been addictive. Both of them hated it, and neither of them wanted to stop.

     Until Malachite was torn apart, forcefully separated by the crystal gems, Lapis had started to completely lose herself. There wasn’t a single part of her that could be defined without the hatred of water, the hatred of Jasper, the hatred and love for being alive and with her. Her self-awareness had become buried under rockslides of pent-up anger, emotional abuse; fits of sobbing and screaming as herself, as Jasper, as Malachite, as both of them and all of them, ripping over her like a waterfall swollen by rain. Nothing could end it. Nobody could bring her back to herself. Then someone did.

     Afterwards, after Steven had shown her the barn, she had run out of hatred and was instead consumed by this unending tiredness, the emotional equivalent of a gray sky at dawn on a not-warm not-cold day. She had been content to just sit, not wanting to think. For the first time, Lapis had struggled herself out. For the first time, she wished herself shattered, just to end the monotony.

     Then Peridot had arrived. The gem was a shock to Lapis, a bright splash of lime-green paint across the gray wall of her existence. Obnoxious, loud, jarring, unpleasant to the eyes, but irrevocably there. She was tiny without her metal limbs, and seemingly determined to make up for her lack of size with a newfound enthusiasm. For everything. She never stopped, never was quiet, never wanted to take a breath between apologizing, overcompensating, learning, shoving each and every thing Lapis didn’t care about into both of their faces. It was all a bit too much.

     She had snapped. The monster in her had roared in sickening triumph as Peridot’s frustrated, earnest face went slack, her eyes blank with disappointment, and she turned away. The rest of Lapis, the part that she wanted to be known as her, had been disappointed in the other part but too proud to acknowledge it. The monster was drowning her out again.

     She saved Peridot from the Roaming Eye to make up for it. Things got better.

Now, she had her morps, her barn, her Pumpkin. And, though she hadn’t wanted to admit it in the beginning, she had Peridot.

The little gem hadn’t ceased to share everything with her – where she was going, what she’d be doing when she got there, what she found inside the barn, what Steven had told her about earth’s weather cycles, the time she’d called Yellow Diamond a clod to her face, her endless opinions on Camp Pining Hearts, the name of every tree, grass species, birdsong and sunrise and cloud type. Lapis couldn’t decide if it was overwhelming or comforting to be able to be silent in the midst of so much overenthusiastic information.

     Eventually, Peridot learned to take some of Lapis’s quiet, when it was better to listen rather than speak. Lapis told her some things but not everything. In a way, she wanted to let the monster out by telling Peridot about it, spew it away, expel it from her body in a powerful, vomitous burst of bile and heartache. She didn’t. She was half-afraid that acknowledging the monster would bring it back, twice as large, and that it would burst into her fully with a roar and consume them both. Peridot wasn’t strong enough to handle Lapis’s monster.

     So she painted Jasper as the monster instead, told only the worst aspects of Malachite’s tomb until Peridot’s eyes grew wide with horror and she sniffled, curling herself into a ball on the rough wood floor of the barn. When Lapis’s voice dropped to a deadly whisper, she told of the worst things Jasper had done, the beating, the pounding, the sick joy she’d found in binding Lapis, keeping her caged bird for the sake of borrowing her wings. Peridot would slowly creep across the floor to Lapis, sink down onto her lap, hold her tightly as she continued to release. Sometimes her fingers would stroke Lapis’s gem, as gentle as summer butterflies, never knowing about the monster that still slept in Lapis, capable of swallowing her whole.

     Then, Jasper came back.

The boat had been an experience – there was no fun in it, but there was a strange comfort in going through the foreign motions of human life. Then Jasper had crashed into it, as chaotic and destructive as a hurricane.

     Lapis saw her face, and the monster in her grew, swelled to the size of the ocean, roared and shrieked and raged.

     “Please,” she had said, deep voice hoarse and eyes repulsively hopeful. Lapis hated that she had created this.

     The monster was surfacing. She had opened her mouth, fist clenched, expecting its familiar rage to surge up in her and finally be justified in pounding Jasper to a pulp. She would be protecting Steven this time, after all.

     But instead, the monster had spilled free from her in a wash of jumbled words, and she watched puzzlement replace the naked longing on Jasper’s face as she admitted everything she’d done. How Lapis had loved hurting Jasper, longed for it, become dependant on it; and then she finally said the truth.

     “How you made me feel – how I made us feel – it was bad, Jasper. I never want that again.”

     She said that, and she meant no.

The monster was off her back, out of her ribcage, and the tomb of the ocean was no longer pressing in around her in suffocating darkness. The monster moved to Jasper instead, made her eyes cruel and angry, made her voice a wordless roar as she failed to communicate what she wanted; maybe Lapis just didn’t hear her.

     Either way, she raised her hand, feeling the familiar surge of adrenaline and happiness, joy, power, as the ocean obeyed her.

     She pummeled the monster away, far into the sky, and watched her fall into the sea.

     After that, the barn started to feel like home. Without the monster prowling, pacing in Lapis’s head, there was room for Lapis to see the wooden walls as things to shelter and not as prison bars. She could look at her smaller-than-average lake and see Peridot’s good intentions instead of a cruel joke at her expense. And Peridot – well, she was surprisingly sympathetic, dedicatedly learning the precise rhythms it took to make Lapis happy, showing her morps and how to grow strange human vegetables, the joy of music. Odd, sweet sounds buzzed through the air in the barn, not oppressive and rhythmic like Homeworld’s music but something entirely new, light, unpredictable, and entirely Earth. Lapis liked the tambourine, the freedom of shaking the tiny flattened bells and listening to them clatter like raindrops on a tin roof.

     Sometimes Lapis still went to Peridot to talk about the tomb. She would try and describe the insurmountable weight of the ocean, but none of her words would even come close, and she would end up sobbing, shaking but dry-eyed, unable to create tears. Peridot would just look at her, eyes full of a vast, bottomless sadness that took Lapis’s breath away because it was so out of place on her small face.

     They would cling to each other, limbs wrapped in a tangle of legs around torsos around backs around shoulders that was never comfortable but always, somehow, comforting.

     Lapis clung to Peridot like a sailor in a shipwreck, and slowly learned to swim again.


End file.
